ITStuff.ca - ITStaff is all about Windows, VMware, Hyper-V, Virtualization, HP Servers, Blades and other IT Technologies. An invaluable source of Tools and Scripts for IT Network Administrators. A valuable advice, Tips, Tricks and best practices for Net Admins.

24 December 2010

Go far beyond the basics of Exchange High Availability and learn what's really going on under the hood in an Exchange 2010 database availability group (DAG). This session covers key aspects of the inner workings of DAGs, including a deep dive technical discussion on how DAGs rely on quorum and how the DAG witness and witness server are used. You'll also gain a solid understanding of Active Manager and it's best copy selection process. This session also includes details on the continuous replication and database copy management improvements added in SP1.

16 December 2010

Microsoft released a cumulative update for Outlook 2007 that provides access to Exchange 2010's Archive mailbox. A long awaited feature, Outlook 2007 users previously had to rely on Outlook Web Access to access their archive. Some organizations have held off deploying Exchange's archive feature because they had Outlook 2007 deployed. Now, the wait is over.

Hotfix 2458611 is now available for the download for the x86 platform. Among the features that will become available to Outlook 2007 users are:

Accessing messages in the archive

Moving messages into the archive

Accessing the archive of a manager when granted delegate access

There are some known limitations when compared to Outlook 2010 and the archive. Among them are the lack of support for archive policies and the ability to search independently of the mailbox and archive.

For more information on Exchange 2010's personal archive feature, see:

05 December 2010

21 November 2010

Computer World created a nice article with a visual tour through 25 years of Windows!

Twenty-five years ago, on Nov. 20, 1985, Microsoft introduced its first version of Windows to the world. Not many people outside the technical press or the tech industry took notice. Product launch events that cost hundreds of millions of dollars were still years away.

08 November 2010

Microsoft P2V Migration for Software Assurance automates the delivery of an updated and personalized Windows 7 operating system while backing up and converting the legacy Windows XP or later desktop and its applications for seamless use within Windows 7. P2V Migration supports both native Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) Lite Touch Installation as well as Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Zero Touch Installation.

25 October 2010

21 October 2010

In Exchange 2010, we now have the option to allow mailboxes to be automatically distributed across databases. However, the algorithm used simply randomly allocates the new mailbox to our chosen databases - rather than ensuring the mailbox count is balanced, and doesn't do anything about re-distributing mailboxes if you add new databases.

To help with this, and of course to help with any situation where you want to balance the number of mailboxes across a set of databases, Steve Goodman has written a simple script that help with moving mailboxes to balance out your databases.

12 October 2010

Bobby Kishore, general manager at Live@edu, kicks off the series with an overview of your Live@edu services. The following videos walk you through each critical phase of deployment:

Verify domain ownership

Plan and prepare for Live@edu deployment

Test and integrate

Launch Live@edu

Follow along as a member of the Microsoft Live@edu development team explains each step of the process, while live-screen captures demonstrate each action. Step 1: Verify domain ownership The first step to successfully deploying your Live@edu services is to verify your domain ownership. Senior Program Manager for Live@edu, Steve Webb, walks you through the process.

26 September 2010

Since Exchange 2010, and the introduction of the document retention period it has been much easier to recover mailboxes, disconnect or connect mailboxes to users, and disable mailboxes. Exchange 2010 has introduced the personal archive, which adds a slight complication.

22 September 2010

Hello Everyone, Just wanted to let you know about a session on Windows Server 2008 R2 Clustering and High Availability that I'm going to present today for WITPro (Winnipeg IT Pro community). Doors open at 5:30 PM, session to start at 6 PM.

20 September 2010

Microsoft has released are some serious updates to the Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server RoleRequirements Calculator, including one piece of functionality that you all have been asking for since the first version been released back in November!

Please go to Mailbox Server Role Storage Requirements Calculator updates tracking page to see what is in this new version! A blog post explaining the calculator (updated for this new version) is here and or you can download the calculator directly.

As part of deployment, many enterprise customers set up the Key Management Service (KMS) to enable activation of Windows in their environment. It is a simple process to set up the KMS host…and the KMS clients discover and attempt to activate on their own. But what happens if it doesn't work? What do you do next? The most common issues seen by our customers (and how to resolve them) are outlined in the Volume Activation Operations Guide, under Volume Activation Troubleshooting. This blog will walk you through the resources you need to troubleshoot, while the information in the Guide st arts with the problem to be solved and the possible ways to fix it. The details of event log entries and the SLMGR.vbs script can be found in the Volume Activation Technical Reference Guide.

16 September 2010

Since the release of Windows 7 and Server 2008-R2 we have about 3000 Group Policy Settings available to centrally configure and manage Windows clients and servers. Though some among us might have worked with GPO settings from the early days on, knowing about the existence of each and every available setting is nearly impossible. It still happens to me that while I am configuring a specific GPO setting, I do come across other GPOs I didn't knew of yet.

Introducing Microsoft® Lync™, formerly Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) and Microsoft Communicator. Lync™ ushers in a new connected experience, transforming every communication into an interaction that is more collaborative, engaging and accessible from anywhere.

15 September 2010

Windows Firewall on Windows Server 2008 helps prevent unauthorized access to computer resources. However, if the firewall is configured incorrectly, attempts to connect to an instance of SQL Server may be blocked. To access an instance of SQL Server that is behind the firewall, you must configure the firewall on the computer that is running SQL Server.

This article helps you open the firewall ports for SQL Server on Windows Server 2008.

Microsoft released the Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM) for Office 2010 and this tool is "Must to Have" tool when you migrate organization from previos version of Office XX to a new one, aka Microsoft Office, Office 2010.

14 September 2010

If you try to sequence Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 (I've tried to do this in SoftGrid 4.5 RC) you will get a error and inside error report you will find "Code: 0x0000000000000000" and a lot of other, not very usefull information about this error.

Don't worry, we still can Sequence Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 :). To do that we need to find MSI package of Adobe Acrobat Reader 9. Wait, wait, wait, don't go to Adobe's FTP server, you will not find there MSI file for English version :).
To get it you have 2 options:

Request this file from Adobe, by subscribe to distribution program

Extract it from AdbeRdr90_en_US.exe file :).

So, as you can understand, I extracted MSI from AdbeRdr90_en_US.exe :). To do that you need:

Run the installer, and wait until the setup dialog appears asking you for a destination folder to install to.

Without closing that dialog open, run Windows Explorer and navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\usernamel\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Setup Files\READER9 .

Bingo :), we have the extracted setup files we will need for sequence. All other steps is straight forward :).

13 September 2010

Most people who have spent a lot of time with Hyper-V have had the experience of accidentally taking too much memory away from the parent partition. This happens when they start too many virtual machines – and all of a sudden the performance and responsiveness of the parent partition goes down significantly.

The former solution for this issue usually was to stop the last virtual machine that they started, to reduce its memory, and then start it up again.

This solution has worked in the past – but is no longer an option with dynamic memory. The reason why this will not work is because if you stop the last virtual machine – you just leave the memory available for your other virtual machines to use – getting you straight back where you started.

For this reason, with dynamic memory Microsoft has implemented a new "Parent Memory Reserve" for Hyper-V. Here Microsoft attempt to calculate an appropriate amount memory to keep for the parent partition and ensure that virtual machines with dynamic memory enabled cannot eat into this reserved memory.

Specifically – it only accounts for the memory requirements of Hyper-V in the parent partition.

To help mitigate this issue – Microsoft is also providing a new registry entry that lets you override our parent memory reserve with your own static memory reserve. This registry entry does not exist by default – but if you go to the HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Virtualization registry key and create a new DWORD entry with a name of memoryreserve – you can then set the value to the static amount of memory that you want to reserve for the parent.

You should be warned – if you set this value too low; virtual machines will be able to use too much memory and cause performance issues for you. Equally – the higher you set this the fewer virtual machines you can run.

By setting this value to 2048 (on my laptop with 8GB of RAM) I can run multiple virtual machines and know that they will not cause Outlook / Internet Explorer in the parent partition to be affected.

Hyper-V clustering is a pretty rock solid thing, and Live Migration is virtually identical to VMWare's VMotion technology - pick up a running VM, and move it to another host in the cluster without users noticing. Generally speaking you might see a small hiccup - one ping lost as the machine stops on one host and starts on another.

But if you shut down a cluster host, say, because you're deploying a Windows Update, or a new version of a backup or monitoring client, the situation is different. Windows will use Quick Migration to move the virtual machines from one host to another - and Quick Migration is nothing like VMotion and Live Migration.

Instead of copying the VM memory and processor state across the network, the virtual machine is saved (to your SAN) on one host, then restored from that saved state on another. The difference is obvious:

A lot of people have been looking for virtualization stencil with good and usefull icons for quite a while. Well, Jonathan Cusson has decided to create one himself and he is now sharing it with us. This stencil is made of icons derived from Hyper-V and other virtualization images. Each image was trimmed and optimized to be used in Visio...

08 September 2010

Just a quick note on an issue in DPM and Exchange Server. Backup administrators who have scheduled System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) backups for Microsoft Exchange databases might run into backup failures if circular logging is turned on for those Exchange databases. In such cases, DPM incremental backups fails with VSS error 0x800423f4 and a retry of the backup job does not resolve the problem.

22 August 2010

So, more and more companies deploying an Exchange 2010. And as you know, the next step after Exchange Implementation MUST be a backup configuration.

And now is a very surprising point. Many sysadmins are willing to pay over for complex backup solutions which they don't necessarily need. As "Exchange Dinosaur" (I still remember Exchange 4.0 :))) I would like to say that one of the best backup (and what is more important, restore solution) always was Microsoft NT Backup. Since Windows 2008 Microsoft has removed NT Backup and replaced it with "Windows Server Backup Feature"

First, I need to mention the aspect that Microsoft has enabled Windows Server Backup to take VSS backups of the Exchange databases, so the following can work on Exchange 2010 and Hyper-V, on Windows 2008 or Windows 2008 R2.

As an additional note, Microsoft has extended Windows Server Backup Feature in Windows 2008 R2, and I really recommend to install Exchange 2010 on Windows 2008 R2 and not on Windows 2008. The reason why I say that is because of a new feature that's come with the Windows Backup Server of Windows 2008 R2. On Windows 2008 R2, backups can be taken from both the Active and the Passive databases of a DAG (Database Availability Group). This is very cool news because, in Windows 2008, backups could only be taken from the Active Node.

Ok, I should stop taking and should start to show you how to implement a FREE Backup of Exchange 2010 :) ...

Historically, Microsoft Outlook has only been supported in an RDSH environment when it is deployed in Online Mode and connected to a Microsoft Exchange Server. This is still the recommended configuration for Microsoft Outlook 2010 when it is deployed in an RDSH environment. However, customers who deploy Outlook 2010 now have the supported option of enabling Cached Exchange Mode when Outlook 2010 is installed in a Remote Desktop environment. Cached Exchange Mode might be ideal for deployments in which Outlook is connecting over a high latency connection to an Exchange server that is located remotely. For the relatively few users who access Outlook through a remote desktop, this might be the ideal configuration. However, Online Mode against the Exchange server is still the most scalable and optimized configuration for large deployments.

This white paper covers three major areas that you should consider when you deploy Outlook 2010 with Cached Exchange Mode in a Remote Desktop environment:

Last few months I've been working on a project for one very big Canadian Company. Now I can say that this project is coming to the end :).

I was concentrated on building a solution for fully unattended deployment procedure of Windows Server 2008 Servers and Windows 7 Workstation. In total this project covers 200 Servers and about 1000 Workstation. I've used a lot of tricks and tips in this project and built a lot of scripts to automate EVERYTHING :).

Today I asked myself, "How many lines of code you wrote in all scripts for this project?"

So, after very simple maths I can say, all my scripts for FULLY UNATTENDED Windows 2008 and Windows 7 system contain 1227 lines :).

19 August 2010

Aidan Finn published on his blog very interesting post. He named it "Interview Questions … To Ask The Interviewer". I'm totally agreed with Adam and decided to republish his post here, at CuruIT.com :)

When Microsoft has released a Hyper-V the first question that I've asked myself was "How do I Backup / Replicate Hyper-V?"
In VMWare world one of the best applications for replication is Veeam, but they have nothing for Hyper-V.

18 August 2010

Prior to Window Server 2008 R2 (namely in Windows Server 2008) you could run into a couple of problems. In Windows Server 2008 R2 Microsoft has implemented a Sysprep provider to ensure that everything goes smoothly. This provider does work during two of the phases of Sysprep:

Generalize

The generalize phase of Sysprep is where an installed version of Windows is prepared to be duplicated – and all installation specific information is removed. During this phase Hyper-V makes a couple of key changes:

The installation date information for Hyper-V cleared. It will be automatically regenerated when the system image is deployed to a new system (or rebooted locally).

The dynamic MAC address range is cleared. This will also be automatically regenerated when the system image is deployed to a new system. This step is necessary to ensure that you do not get duplicate MAC addresses on multiple Hyper-V servers if they are all deployed from the same base image.

Specialize

The specialize phase is run after the system image has been deployed to a new computer. Hyper-V makes the following change as part of this phase:

Enable automatic launching of the hypervisor in the boot configuration data (BCD) store. Because a new boot configuration data store is created as part of the image deployment process, and because Hyper-V stores information in the boot configuration data store – we need to make sure this information comes across to the new system.

17 August 2010

Live Webinar, Wednesday, August 18, 2:00 PM EDT
During this session, StarWind will explore the role of iSCSI Shared storage as part of a SharePoint implementation. As organizations begin to adopt the cloud computing model, the private cloud utilizing technologies like SharePoint is rapidly becoming the technology of choice for the SMB.

On this webinar we will cover the following:
• Role of Share Storage in the private cloud
• The Software needed and how to use it
• Data protection
• Disaster Recovery
• High Availability

13 August 2010

This whitepaper discusses the benefits, configurations and considerations when planning a Microsoft® Windows Server® Remote Desktop Services solution with Microsoft Application Virtualization (App?V®), and while I could probably write up a big long summary and post it here, probably the best way to let you know what's in it is to show the table of contents:

If you run App-V 4.6 on your Remote Desktop Session Host (RD Session Host) servers then you definitely owe it to yourself to check this one out. You can download the whitepaper here.

10 August 2010

Disaster recovery has become table stakes in the world of servervirtualization. Any good virtualization platform these days will finda way to restart a virtual machine in the event of a hardware failure.But which vendor excels more than any other at getting criticalapplications back online after failures, and making sure the mostimportant virtual machines are given priority in the restart process?

06 August 2010

I've been using a Windows Server OS as my laptop / desktop for many years by now.
Currently, I am using Windows Server 2008 R2 as my primary laptop. When I added a Hyper-V role I discovered that "Sleep Mode" on my laptop just stopped working.

After some tests and investigations, I've come up with a partial solution to this problem. The trick to use a Sleep Mode on a system where a Hyper-V installed is to have Hyper-V NOT started.
To set a Hyper-V to "Manual Start", I did a script with a following registry setting:

23 July 2010

Recently, I had some strange problem with a network interface inside Windows 2008. I managed to solve my problem only by reset the whole network IP stack in Windows 2008 (Those steps work in Windows Vista and Windows 7 as well). Here are steps:

15 July 2010

As many of you know, I'm doing a lot of projects related to system deployments. Sometimes it is servers, sometimes it's a workstations, sometimes it's both :).

Right now I've been working on a project where we are going to deploy Windows 2008 Servers in about 200 sites across Canada. As you can guess, this project also contains workstations and there are going to be Windows 7 Professional.

Since Microsoft released Windows Vista, the only supported way to "clone" windows systems become SYSPREP. Personally, I've been using sysprep since Windows NT 4, but there were other solutions that many professionals used to use.

So, as I said, I've been involved in a new deployment project :)...When we finished installing and customizing our Windows 7 system, I've executed a following command:Continue at my site, CuruIT.com

19 June 2010

I just wanted to let everyone know, StarWind is in Xen Server HCL. You can see that now by following this link:http://hcl.xensource.com/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductType=Storage&ProductName=iSCSI+SAN+Software+5.3.5

17 June 2010

Recently, during Windows 2008 Cluster implementation I was asked the question about Cluster Log. Equally question was, Misha, why we don't see the Cluster log in %systemroot%\system32\LogFiles\Cluster folder, like it was in a previous version of a cluster.

Remote Desktop Connection Manager (RDCMan) manages multiple remote desktop connections. It is useful for managing server labs where you need regular access to each machine such as automated checkin systems and data centers. It is similar to the built-in MMC Remote Desktops snap-in, but more flexible.

13 June 2010

On Microsoft Enterprise Support Windows Server Core Team blog published very useful article about Failover Cluster Startup Switches. If you are working with a Microsoft Cluster (as I do :) ), take a look on this post and you will get more information about troubleshooting switches used to start a Windows 2008 and 2008 R2 Failover Cluster...

02 June 2010

My old project "TheSystemAdministrator.com" has been moving to the new home :). The new domain for this project will be www.CuruIT.com. I've already moved all content to the new system and now trying to save all external links to the TheSystemAdministrator.com. If you are using old links to my site and for whatever reason you are getting to the wrong page on CuruIT.com, please use the CuruIT's search engine.